Unity 5 ~ pixel perfect ~ character design

Hey there! here’s the march dev report! We made great improvements the last month so there’s some stuff that we’ve been working on.

New Unity, new possibilities

We made a great progress in the development and rewriting of the code and also took the opportunity to port the game to Unity 5. This new version of Unity brings a few improvements when using Mecanim and integrating animations into the game.

Another great feature will be the possibility to port the game directly to WiiU, which will make our work much easier when adapting Paradise Lost to the Nintendo platform -our priority after the PC versions-.

Perfectly aligned

One of the things that we have implemented with the new version is pixel perfect. In case someone doesn’t know what we are talking about, it means that all pixels are the same size and stay aligned to a grid. Unity by default doesn’t work at pixel level but based on textures, so we had to implement this solution by ourselves. This way, the game has a much nicer finish and we don’t see half pixel intersections when the characters are still.

Many pixel art games made in Unity don’t use this technique, but we wanted a top-notch look.

You can’t escape the enemy’s sight

The other BIG improvement that we have achieved is the rotation of elements within Unity itself, allowing enemies to aim in any direction -which saves us from animate hundreds of frames and also enhance the enemy’s precision-.

In very little time Carlos has managed to implement an algorithm that reads the pixel matrix in every sprite, redrawing them in each position. Thanks to this, you won’t see inclined pixels in a forced way, but squared pixels nicely aligned with the background grid.

Plurality

Another thing that we wanted to share with all of you is the way we design the different characters in the game. To achieve a great variety of enemies we made a basic unisex head, on which we set up different elements (hairstyles, facial hair, accessories) and therefore obtaining diverse results from the same pattern.

Thanks to this all the enemies are unique, adding a lot of variety to the game (and also helping players to recognize certain rooms depending on their looks).